The Vietnamese-American dream

“Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we’ve all been there.” So says war correspondent Michael Herr on the persistent reality of a war curiously prone to re-examination. In The Lotus and the Storm, by Vietnamese-American author Lan Cao, this revisiting takes the form of a dialogue of sorts between a daughter and a father, lotuses swept to America’s shores by the storm of the American intervention.

Lost in reincarnation

A middle-aged and miserable American woman reaches the end of her mental rope and absconds to some foreign or underdeveloped place to find herself—and possibly a mate. This new genre encompasses the wildly popular if dissimilar Eat, Pray, Love and Wild. Add to these a novel, A Well-Tempered Heart by Jan-Philipp Sendker, where the unlikely foreign setting is Myanmar, aka Burma.

An exuberant take on the beautiful game

America is anomalous, as insular as its two oceans suggest. Consider the game known stateside as soccer and elsewhere as football. An American would struggle to name a global soccer star, despite their commanding astronomical salaries and divine admiration. The Sun and Other Stars, by Chicago author Brigid Pasulka, offers a glimpse into the glamour and goofiness of the so-called "beautiful game.”

Wartime secrets left behind

In the 1990s, a war in Sierra Leone killed tens of thousands of people and shattered the country. Yet writer Aminatta Forna, who is from Sierra Leone, has dedicated her absorbing new novel, The Hired Man, to that other 1990s war-torn region, Yugoslavia, thus subtly illuminating the prolonged aftereffects of all wars.Duro is a Croat living in the ghostly town of Gost. One day, an Englishwoman...

Life and death surround a young Haitian girl

A portrait of Haiti derived from facts alone would be grim. It is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, suffers from catastrophic deforestation and is frequently visited by the United States military. In 2010, an earthquake added insult to perennial injury.Edwidge Danticat’s new novel, Claire of the Sea Light, offers a somewhat different picture. Deforestation rates a mention....

Trading lives, trading worlds

If you could guarantee your child a rich life in exchange for forfeiting your right to see her, would you do it? The question informs the engrossing new novel by Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini, whose surprise international bestseller, The Kite Runner, so enchanted readers 10 years ago.The child in question is Pari, whose long-suffering father arranges her adoption by a well-to-do Afghan...

Inside the city of death

One of the better known "failed states" is Somalia, which has been at war with itself since the collapse of its ruinous military regime in 1991. The country gained notoriety during the disastrous attempt by the United States to intervene in the conflict, which was portrayed in the book Black Hawk Down, later adapted into an acclaimed film.Failed or no, Somalia has produced Nuruddin...

The world of Muslim women

Muslim women are much spoken of, seldom heard from, unless in the almost obligatory television scenes of bereaved Palestinian mothers or veiled Afghani daughters. Perhaps no other group is so misunderstood. But this is changing. Witness the timely Madras on Rainy Days, by Indian-American Muslim author Samina Ali. Despite its title, the novel is set mostly in Hyderabad, an Indian bastion of...

Identity crisis

Japan may possess the world's greatest disparity between public decorum and private perversity. This darker side of Japanese life is explored in Country of Origin, the first novel by Ploughshares editor Don Lee. The plot centers around the disappearance of Lisa Countryman, a young American who finds herself working in dodgy Tokyo establishments catering to the peccadilloes of Japanese...